Winning the Urbanism Meme War

What people assume we’re saying matters just as much as what we’re actually saying.

I posted a note on Substack a few weeks ago riffing on how we talk about zoning.

Here’s what I said:

I'm the first one to say zoning laws need to change, and that alone would make a massive dent in the problem of housing costs and availability.

But we know zoning, while critical, is only one (important) piece of the puzzle.

The stakeholders who have personal (and often selfish) incentives to keep zoning where it is are the same stakeholders who aren’t going to invest in those better-zoned places, even once things start getting built there.

(The new budget bill headed to the Senate is an example of how this plays out at the macro level.)

Zoning is one layer of getting people to accept and welcome more—or new—neighbors.

It’s a critical layer, and everything I’m saying here is a both/and, not an either/or.

But I think there are several layers to this, and I worry that if urbanists aren’t ready to champion strong next steps in places where the conversation has moved to “we changed zoning—now what?”, it will tee up overpromising and underdelivering on the impact (while still very real and significant) those zoning changes can have.

And we just can’t afford to have those kinds of wins fall flat.

Let’s keep advocating for zoning reform, emphasizing the impacts it can make. But let’s also be careful not to sell it as some kind of silver bullet that will fix everything.

There’s no such thing as a silver bullet.

As a friend of mine likes to say, “It’s incredibly simple. And it’s incredibly complicated.”

The response was positive overall. But one comment said something to the effect of, “Literally nobody is saying zoning is a silver bullet.”

The replies are seldom a place to go if you’re looking for feel-good praise on your content, but this isn’t about litigating my comment section.

The comment actually brought up something really important about how we talk about ideas.

Because, sure, there’s probably someone out there who “literally” thinks zoning is a silver bullet. But the commenter’s point was basically right. The vast majority of urbanists don’t think fixing American cities is as simple as allowing five-over-ones on every lot.

But that’s not really the point.

When we talk about ideas, it’s not enough to be correct or to believe the right things. It’s not even enough to communicate the right things. Not if we want those ideas to actually gain traction outside the urbanism bubble.

In a meme-ified culture, we have to anticipate the tropes and stereotypes that come with our ideas. The assumptions people are going to make. And most importantly, the promises people think we’re making, even if we didn’t make them.

Speaking of comment sections, someone once told me I have a very meme-based view of urbanism. And honestly, they weren’t totally wrong. There are two reasons for that, and they’re pretty intertwined:

I fell down the urbanism rabbit hole via the internet, like a lot of people have in the last decade. That means I was first exposed to urbanist ideas in tweet form. And Twitter is famously not the place for nuance, so the meme version is what I got first.

Then I read more, listened more, learned more. But I didn’t pivot to wanting to be a developer, a city council member, or a think tank guy. I wanted to find a way to use my background in marketing, communications, and writing to help these ideas go mainstream. To get them out of urbanism nerddom and into more places where they can actually shape the built world.

And that meant learning how to not just communicate these ideas in short-form, meme-like ways, but learning how to strengthen the meme version of the idea, knowing full well that even the most brilliant tweet will never carry the nuance or weight of your favorite urbanism book or dissertation.

The formation of urbanism’s program and the distillation of that program for the masses are connected, but they’re still different exercises.

When we’re forming ideas, the nuance lives in the content. What do we believe? What are we prescribing? What outcomes do we want? What are the tradeoffs, and why are we okay with them?

When we’re communicating those ideas, the nuance lives in perception. What’s being heard? What’s being assumed? It becomes an exercise in empathy, especially for people who are uninitiated, skeptical, or just plain antagonistic toward the whole thing.

And more often than not, those folks are going to reduce the message into its most meme-able format.

The answer to that isn’t pointing people to urban theory. It’s creating a better meme.

(Quick aside: I’m using “meme” here to mean any sort of short-form, oversimplified version of an idea—not just image macros.)

And cracking the code to better memes starts with understanding what people are hearing right now. What promises they think are being made. What implications they’re picking up from the way we’re talking, even if we don’t say them outright.

That brings us back to zoning.

Like I said, the commenter was right: most urbanists don’t see zoning as a silver bullet for revitalizing cities. But in a world where more and more decision-makers are terminally online, the way zoning gets talked about on the internet can make it sound like some Ozempic-style miracle drug. Or at least like a lever you can pull that doesn’t need any other support.

A former pastor of mine used to say, “Now, don’t hear what I’m not saying.” He understood that even in a 30-to-45-minute long-form message, there was always the potential for misunderstanding. But what made him effective was the fact that he anticipated that (and stepped into it) rather than waiting for the snarky email to roll in on Monday.

Urbanists have the opportunity to do the same thing.

We live in a time of short attention spans, politicized everything, and idea-consumption that increasingly happens via algorithm. If urbanists want to grow a movement in that kind of world, it requires a communication strategy that embraces Meme Urbanism, TikTok Urbanism, Scrollable Urbanism, or whatever you want to call it.

Because the next generation of urbanists is going to find these ideas online. They’ll see a cool TikTok, tweet, or Instagram Reel, find it interesting, and then see more of it as the algorithm kicks in.

We have the chance to meet those people with digital hospitality. To make sure the short-form content that surrounds them is made with them in mind. It means anticipating their starting point, the assumptions they might (rightly or wrongly) make, and the questions or barriers they’ll need help working through.

If urbanists want to win hearts and minds, we can’t just win the policy battle.

We have to win the meme war too.